Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “STOP Buying ANDROID TV Boxes!”.
Subscription streaming services are getting to the point where they cost as much as a cable subscription used. To I mean it’s, no wonder people are setting sail for the streaming seas. That is where this morally ambiguous plastic box comes in. It can be had for about the price of a family outing to McDonald’s and Promises to provide cheap or even free access to copyrighted content for anyone, no technical skills required. I mean there must be a catch right. Oh now, that’s a yikes desktop Echoes discovery of a pre-installed back door on the t95 made us wonder. Is it a one-off or does it impact the plethora of similar Android boxes available on Amazon AliExpress and nearly every other Online Marketplace to find out? We bought a whole stack of them and, as it turns out, the t95’s back door is only the tip of the iceberg. So then, are any of these things worth buying, or do they all need to go straight to the landfill, like I’m gon na, go straight to this Segway to our sponsor iFixit? Is your battery not lasting as long as it used to looking for a new project? Ifixit, has you covered stay tuned to the end of the video to learn more about their battery replacement kits legally questionable set top boxes are nothing new way. Back in 2009, I talked about the popcorn hour c200, whose big party trick was the ability to stream from torrents, rather than waiting for them to finish downloading, there’s a big market for this kind of stuff and as part of the Napster generation I may or may Not have dabbled myself at some point no judgment. However, it’s important to remember that the kinds of folks who are willing to help you circumvent copyright law tend to be the same kinds of folks who don’t care about other laws either like privacy or data collection laws. To what you might think come on minus how bad could it be? Let’S have a look booting up any one of these boxes, you’re going to be greeted with a friendly setup process and brought to a home screen that looks at least vaguely like Android TV. If you’re running a pie, hole like desktop Echo was, this might be the point where you start to see red flags in what seems to be a best case scenario. The Box might be trying to Ping an address with fota in the URL.
Fota stands for firmware over the air and is relatively standard, Android Behavior. What isn’t relatively standard is that if you look up the IP that URL is going to point to a place that at least someone refers to as China. Now this isn’t a problem in and of itself, but with China’s looser regulations, especially with respect to foreign Nationals.
It means that there are no guarantees that the firmware that you download will be clean or that it will even be firmware at all. In a much worse scenario, your experience will mimic desktop Echoes, who found countless attempts to contact URLs that were made up of jumbled, letters and lesser used top level domains that were attempting to dump payloads into the now notorious core Java directory. This matters because this directory appears to be a relative of CopyCat, an Android malware with truly terrifying capabilities.
The original infected an estimated 14 million devices and was designed primarily to generate and steal ad Revenue, but given that it can root your device inject itself alongside apps that you launch and control your network activity, it can be used for all kinds of Nefarious activities. Coming back to our devices, then, when inspecting their file systems using Android debug Bridge, we found almost half of them had the same core Java, folder and open preferences file, even if they didn’t immediately try to access any questionable URLs another one had the core Java folder, Though it was empty as if the firmware image that they used contained the same malware at some point, but it was removed, did they have a change of heart? Did they accidentally break the malware’s functionality or did they remove it to install something worse? We don’t know another possibility is that it’s a Remnant from borrowing someone else’s homework, there’s evidence that at least half of the units that we bought use, modified versions of Android that started off their lives as Android for Google pixel phones. One such image calls itself big. Droid OS, the lack of Google results for big Droid, seems to indicate that it exists only for use on Android set-top boxes and could even be an internally developed Fork at a manufacturer of these devices. Now now we did find big Droid OS installed on three different boxes that seem to come from different manufacturers, but all three of them share the same all winter SOC model and the same specs, and also we have no way to confirm that they actually came from Different places, at least not without flying to China, to track the factories down in person, which is a lot of time and expense for a throwaway Scooby-Doo reveal bit and besides. It doesn’t really matter because we’ve seen enough at this point to say definitively that you shouldn’t plug any of these things into your home network, at least not without precautions.
I mean what, if we could meddle with the box and prevent the malware from getting away with whatever it’s trying to do. Could we make any of these into useful devices? Most of them do have four gigs of RAM the ability to Output in 4k, Bluetooth Wi-Fi! Well, that’s a tough one blocking the bad behavior that we know about won’t, protect us against the unknown and there’s a lot that we don’t know. Most of these came pre-rooted with alternative app stores and a rebranded version of Kodi. That does not Inspire confidence.
They could easily contain payloads that Target other devices on your local network or persistent malware, that steals login credentials and no amount of monitoring is enough to say for sure that everything has been found and eliminated. A backdoor in the system, for example, could lay dormant for months or even years only to awaken when a bad actor needs your zombie device to join a large DDOS attack, or something like that. Now one option would be to find a clean, ROM and install it in place of the stock operating system. I mean they are rooted devices after all, but unfortunately our attempts at this were frustrating at best and downright impossible. At worst, it seems like all the resellers that offer flashable firmware. Images are content posting the files on Mega, Dropbox or OneDrive. So if those files expire, they either don’t notice or they don’t care and when you do find a ROM and you figure out how to flash it onto your device. Odds are good that you will end up right back where you started core Java, folder and all oh, and also I mean if you bought this thing for the pirated content, that’s not going to survive a clean, Android installation anyway, there does seem to be one project Going to make custom firmware for Android set-top boxes, but it only works if they have amlogic socs and certain streaming. Apps are going to be very limited in functionality if they work at all but hey, you might say, they’re still able to do 4K right right. No aside from lagging super badly, this image is clearly not 4K and when we went in with ADB and checked the screen size being reported by the system, all of these boxes were either stuck at 1080P or even 720p, which is hilarious because this one says 8K. Not even 4K, so do they have any redeeming qualities.
Are they lying about? What’S inside the box as well yeah, even though this advertises four gigs of RAM, even though Android reports, four gigs of RAM and even though the chips on the board appear to be for a four gig set with a searchable part number and everything, it’s not four. Gigs, only half of that will ever be usable and the system properties seem to corroborate that this probably explains why the text on these Micron memory chips look so faded as though it was cheaply printed at the factory. This issue is not just limited to Android TV boxes either as some car stereos running Android apparently also have the fake Ram problem, which means that these and those are all essentially manufactured E-Waste. Unless you know your way around Android very well and can get a clean image onto yours, there is nothing to guarantee that it won’t eventually engage in illicit activities on your network or try to steal your Google login. So for just about anyone, it’s not worth the risk, especially when these things cost about the same as a Chromecast with Google TV, even the 4K model. In some cases I mean sure, that’s not a perfect device. Either.
Internal storage is limited to eight gigs. A new power, brick and dongle is required to add USB or MicroSD support, and it only has two gigs of RAM but come on at least it’s not Trojan horsing its way into your living room to live across the coffee table from your stylishltdstore.com fro pillows. If you want something more powerful, the Nvidia Shield is definitely that offering up 1080p to 4K upscaling, regular software updates and the ability to act as a Plex Media Server, though it does come at a significantly higher price. Both of these Alternatives can run Kodi without too much issue if that’s what you’re into both are capable of 4K but for real and, most importantly, both come free of malware. We’Re gon na have links in the description below. If you want to pick up one of those back to these, then streaming services can be really expensive.
Setting up and tweaking reliable trusted devices can be frustrating, especially if it’s for an elderly or less tech savvy relative, and I’m not going to stand here and tell you to Pirate or not to pirate. I’M just going to tell you to practice safe computing and this ain’t it. What this is is a segue to our sponsor iFixit iFixit wants to help you keep your devices powered like they are brand. New iFixit has a wide range of battery replacement kits for your mobile devices, kits for laptops, cell phones, tablets, smart watches and even the Nintendo switch, and you don’t need to be an expert to repair your devices.
Each kit has a simple to follow. Step-By-Step guide with photos, that’ll help walk you through your replacement, so you can learn a new hobby while also saving yourself time and money check out ifixit.com LTT to find fix kits for your devices today. If you like, this video, maybe check out our Roundup of dash cams, the Android TV boxes of the car .